At the moment, the average number of RSS subscriptions [what’s RSS?] to cybersoc.com is 604. Here’s how feedburner calculates this daily average:
"FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how
many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period.
Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed
readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.
Subscribers is calculated by matching IP address and feed reader
combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the
multitude of readers and aggregators and bots on the market to make
additional inferences."
As I noted a few weeks ago, this means that the number of people consuming content from cybersoc.com via RSS now far outweighs the number of people viewing the site as a web page through a browser.
Below is a graph showing monthly page impressions and unique users for the first six months of 2007:
The dramatic rise in traffic in June is related to my various posts about the Virginia Tech massacre and the way Journalists, myself included, combed social networks and blogs for eyewitness accounts.
Below is another graph, this one showing quarterly traffic over the last three quarters, so it also captures the last three months of 2006 (I started using statcounter immediately before the start of the final quarter of 2006):
The other metric I look at is my technorati rank which, at present, 14,837 with a respectable 2,455 "blog reactions" (inbound links). My personal feeling is that technorati statistics show, better than user numbers and page views, how much impact a blog is having on the blogosphere.
I’ve recently started adding links to various social bookmarking and recommendation services to the bottom of each post here and am curious to see how, if at all, this affects the number of inbound links over time. I’m also curious to see if an increasing number of RSS subscribers translates to more page impressions and unique users via the web page or if those numbers will stay steady while more and more people begin to use RSS.